Ultrabook: Intel’s $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game

In an effort to blunt the (ARM-based) tablet threat, Intel wants PC makers to …

PC OEMs have the skills

Technically, I don't think any of this is beyond the wit of the PC manufacturers. Though it may surprise many of the company's fans, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on design or technology. Far from it. Dell's Adamo line included a number of machines that were genuinely attractive and thoughtfully designed. They even included a few experimental design elements: the Adamo XPS's screen hinge doubled as a kind of support, to put the keyboard at an angle, for a slighty superior typing action. Kind of quirky, and perhaps not to everybody's taste, but innovative and unusual.

The Adamo XPS: not perfect, but nonetheless exciting

Dell

Apple may like to trumpet its use of "Thunderbolt," aka Light Peak, and it's certainly true that Apple has used the technology more broadly than anyone else. But the other company using Light Peak—Sony—is doing something far more exciting with it.

Apple has produced a monitor with a bunch of ports—USB and Firewire—that connects over Light Peak. That's not a bad thing to do, but it's not exactly groundbreaking. Compare that with Sony, which has produced, for its Vaio Z range, an external module that contains an entire GPU, a Blu-ray optical drive, gigabit ethernet, and some USB ports, one of which is USB3. That's exciting in ways that Apple's monitor can't even begin to approach, and it's something that really wasn't practical without Light Peak's bandwidth.

The Vaio Z's dock contains its own GPU and supports up to three monitors

Of course, Sony slightly undermines the impressiveness of its achievement by including a 20-year-old, and desperately obsolete, VGA connector onto the machine, meaning that the Vaio Z manages to both be a glimpse of the future (or at least, a possible future) and a look back into the PC's distant past. The price is something of an issue, too. (If the Vaio Z could be bought without the docking station, it might also be a strong competitor with the 13" MacBook Air; alas, that is not an option.)

The PC world has interesting niche systems, too, like the new Razer Blade. This could blow up and be nothing more than a spectacular failure—$2800 is a lot of money for a laptop, and I just don't know if gamers will pay the premium for the thinness or the funky multitouch LCD touchpad—but you can't fault Razer's ambition, and the machine looks impressive from both a design and a technology standpoint.

The PC industry undoubtedly has the designers and the innovators to build credible Ultrabooks. It just hasn't, so far, put all the pieces together to actually do it.

Intel's battle plan

Intel hopes that its investment will enable companies to start putting the pieces together. What's less clear to me, after talking with Intel, is just how this will happen. I spoke with Greg Welch, who heads up Intel's Ultrabook efforts. He likened the Ultrabook to previous initiatives such as Centrino. Centrino laptops include an Intel processor, an Intel chipset, and Intel WiFi; there were some nuances, but essentially, this trio of features made a system a Centrino system. Systems that met the Centrino requirements could use the Centrino branding.

At the time Centrino was first promoted, WiFi was not the ubiquitous feature it is today. Intel argues that the Centrino brand helped change that; Centrino was a thing that people wanted to have, so OEMs offered it, and WiFi became widespread.

Ultrabook, however, will not be an actual brand. There won't be an Ultrabook badge, or set of da-dum-da-dum chimes. There are some basic system parameters, and that's it. PC builders may or may not choose to use the Ultrabook terminology—it's possible that they'll use it as a kind of shorthand to mean "thin, light, goes all day on one charge," but they might, like Apple, do nothing of the sort. The term could simply become the next "netbook": a category of machine that's widely used but doesn't quite mean the same thing to all people.

Welch conceded that technology-wise, everything needed to produce Ultrabooks already exists. Intel's investment program will last three years, and it's possible that toward the end of that time there will be novel battery or screen technologies on some of these machines, but nothing about the Ultrabook concept requires new technology; it just requires the better integration of existing technology and practices.

But this makes it harder to see just how Intel's investment will help. If Ultrabooks needed new technology, it would be "easy"—just invest in some companies doing the kind of research required and see what they come up with. Intel doesn't need new technology, however. It needs the PC industry to change how it works.

This won't be easy. There are lots of players—manufacturers, designers, component suppliers—who all need to work in concert. They all need to buy into Intel's vision: a migration away from modular system construction in favor of more integrated approaches, and greater use of custom designs instead of off-the-shelf parts. To hit Intel's 40 percent target for Ultrabooks, the PC companies can't relegate Ultrabooks to a niche—they need to transform their entire businesses. Three hundred million dollars suddenly doesn't look like a lot of money.

Intel will be working with component suppliers to make it easier and cheaper to produce custom batteries, metal cases, and the other things that Ultrabooks will need. But that's a far cry from ensuring that the manufacturers actually commit to this kind of approach. Modular systems, infinite diversity, and slim margins are thoroughly entrenched and will not be readily given up. Consumer expectations may also need to be managed. Failure is a real possibility. If prices remain too high, if the Ultrabooks are buried under lesser machines, if consumers are uninterested, if quality levels aren't attained, Ultrabooks will struggle, and the operational changes they require will falter.

Toshiba's Z830, due in November

The initial test will come next month, when the first true non-Apple Ultrabooks hit the market for between $999 and $1999. Intel continues to refuse the kind of price cuts that OEMs demand, but RAM and LCD prices have dropped, allowing vendors to hit the $999 price point anyway. Still, not everybody is on board with the Ultrabook plan; Dell and Toshiba are both said to be cautious (though Toshiba will launch an Ultrabook in November), with the real push coming from Acer, Asus, and Samsung. Demonstrating the upheaval that Ultrabooks are causing, Asus is warning that it will only be able to produce about 200,000 Ultrabooks a month, as its supply chain has only a limited ability to produce the specialized components that Ultrabooks need. To move beyond this, Asus says that more investment is needed.

The PC industry may be transforming its business much later than Apple, but the next round of models does look like it will hit the mark. If the PC industry can pull this off, I will be happy, Intel will be happy, and the PC industry as a whole will be healthier. If it doesn't, the downward spiral will continue as HP is merely the first of many to abandon ship. And I still won't have the laptop I want.